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#CollegeInYour30s: Volume Two - "The 911 Class" [essay series]
--snip--
I’m probably from the last generation that remembers those type of events in middle school, since the Soviet Union collapsed by the time I got to junior high school.
Which is when the Gulf War kicked off, a war that started and ended within my freshman year of junior high.
My freshman year of high school Black Hawk Down happened.
I graduated high school in the mid 90s, when Bill Clinton was running for re-election and the economy was actually causing optimism among Americans instead of stress.
The biggest worry in the world when I was in college in the late 90s was Kosovo and the ethnic cleansing going on. By the time I stopped attending school full time, the USS Cole attack occurred. An embassy attack or two had occurred and small fires seemed to be popping up around the globe.
A few months after that I was in the dorm room of the woman who ended up becoming my wife – at the college I’m attending now and attended previously – when I awoke, flipped on the old-school 13-inch box television and saw one of the Twin Towers on fire. About 20 seconds after I called for my now-wife to come look (she was showering) a second plane hit the other tower. When she came in the room we both looked at the tv – then out her 10-floor dorm window where we could see the smoke rising from lower Manhattan.
.
Now, 12 years later, I’m back to finish what I started - with a graduating class that experienced all of that, only without the happy, optimistic Bill Clinton years and small, far-away military events that didn’t dominate headlines.
The 911 class.
How they feel about Syria and military intervention in light of growing up only knowing their country at war, only knowing the threat of terrorism and only knowing George W. Bush as a president who calls for attacking other nations, will reveal a lot about the psychological effects on a generation of American children raised in war and reaching maturity in an uncertain economic and global period in American history.
Which is when the Gulf War kicked off, a war that started and ended within my freshman year of junior high.
My freshman year of high school Black Hawk Down happened.
I graduated high school in the mid 90s, when Bill Clinton was running for re-election and the economy was actually causing optimism among Americans instead of stress.
The biggest worry in the world when I was in college in the late 90s was Kosovo and the ethnic cleansing going on. By the time I stopped attending school full time, the USS Cole attack occurred. An embassy attack or two had occurred and small fires seemed to be popping up around the globe.
A few months after that I was in the dorm room of the woman who ended up becoming my wife – at the college I’m attending now and attended previously – when I awoke, flipped on the old-school 13-inch box television and saw one of the Twin Towers on fire. About 20 seconds after I called for my now-wife to come look (she was showering) a second plane hit the other tower. When she came in the room we both looked at the tv – then out her 10-floor dorm window where we could see the smoke rising from lower Manhattan.
.
Now, 12 years later, I’m back to finish what I started - with a graduating class that experienced all of that, only without the happy, optimistic Bill Clinton years and small, far-away military events that didn’t dominate headlines.
The 911 class.
How they feel about Syria and military intervention in light of growing up only knowing their country at war, only knowing the threat of terrorism and only knowing George W. Bush as a president who calls for attacking other nations, will reveal a lot about the psychological effects on a generation of American children raised in war and reaching maturity in an uncertain economic and global period in American history.
http://thesterlingroad.com/2013/09/04/collegeinyour30s-volume-two-the-911-class-essay-series/